


How It Ends

by Severina



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Community: tamingthemuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2013-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-20 03:43:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/882547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severina/pseuds/Severina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now he walks, across cracked concrete littered with rusting heaps of metal next to fields overgrown with wildflowers.  The earth is coming back to what it used to be, before man got their hands on it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How It Ends

**Author's Note:**

> Written for LJ's tamingthemuse for the prompt "dystopia". Very very very Post Season Three.
> 
> * * *

Daryl babied the bike as much as he could, jury-rigged parts to keep it running, but it finally gave out a couple of years ago. Now he walks, across cracked concrete littered with rusting heaps of metal next to fields overgrown with wildflowers. The earth is coming back to what it used to be, before man got their hands on it. There's plenty of game, and the water that runs in the streams he finds is clear and fresh and cold. 

He avoids the cities. The towers crumble without warning, and the people he's seen there scuttle from place to place, backs hunched, eyes wild. 

He tries to get used to the silence. In times before he reveled in it, couldn't wait to escape the plant on a Friday night so he could head out to the woods behind the old place, just sit under the stars and breathe. Even in the after, when it was down to a dozen of them and he counted each and every one of them family – more family than he ever had, better family than he ever deserved – he still sometimes wished they'd all just shut up, stop talking or snoring or making plans that were never going to work, plans that were doomed to failure from the very beginning. Plans that he never should've believed, 'cause that's how you get your heart broken. Learned that from his pa years ago, relearned it from Merle. He should've remembered.

Rick was right about one thing. The walkers did eventually decay so much that they collapsed where they stood, no more threatening than turtles stuck on their backs. But Rick and Carol, Carl and Glenn and Maggie, all the others… they never got to find that safe place to live out their days, never got to plant those crops Rick was always going on about. They were all dead by then.

Daryl stops at an old intersection, squints into the sunlight. The signs have long ago blown down and grass is growing straight and long through the cracks in the road, but he traveled this road every day for more than twenty years and he doesn't need directions to point the way. His feet have brought him unerringly back to the old homestead even though his conscious mind didn't realize it. He stands and scratches at his beard and finally shrugs, hitches the crossbow further up on his shoulder and turns south, toward the old dirt track that leads to the house. It's a good a place as any to stop for a while. He'll do any repairs that need doing, batten down the hatches and start stockpiling food for the cold months.

And if this is the winter that finally catches him in its teeth and won't let go, he's fine with that, too. He's still got one bullet in the gun.

He hums softly under his breath as he walks, some little song that Judith used to like. He strolls through the shattered debris of a dead world, and the skull of a walker grinds to powder under his boot.


End file.
